Andy Murray will begin preparations for Wimbledon tomorrow when he steps on to the grass courts of Queen's, allaying fears that he might choose to skip the Aegon Championships, the traditional warm-up event.
As the No.1 seed and the main draw-card for the tournament, it would have been difficult for the Scot to pull out, not least since in April he signed a five-year deal to play in the event.
In the aftermath of his quarter-final defeat by David Ferrer at Roland Garros on Wednesday, Murray said he would consider his options after discussing things with his team, including coach Ivan Lendl.
In truth, there was never really much chance he would withdraw and after returning to London, the world No.4 decided a couple of days' rest will be enough.
Tomorrow, he will begin practising on the grass, ready to defend the title he won in style 12 months ago.
"I always look forward to the grass-court season," he said. "It's a fun part of the year, a completely different surface and you need a different game-plan and style to do well on it.
"One part of the grass season which is nice is that I get to spend an extended time at home, and, this year, with it being the Olympics, I will be there for the next couple of months."
Though he was second-best against Ferrer, Murray said there were plenty of reasons to be positive, not least from the way he recovered from a back spasm early in the tournament.
Back on a faster surface, the Scot said he will be accompanied throughout the grass-court season by Lendl, who also was present in Paris.
"It will be good to have him there for the whole of the build-up," Murray said. "A lot of the messages are the same for all of the surfaces – I think what we were discussing pre-Australia and pre-French are pretty similar.
"The more time we spend with each other, the better he will understand my game and the better he will understand me as a person.
"I will know the right questions to ask him before the big matches, the big tournaments. I am still learning a lot from him and, hopefully, that will be the case leading up to Wimbledon."
Murray will be joined by two other top-10 players in Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia and by two former champions, Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt.
There will also be four Britons for company after three more wild cards were awarded yesterday, including one for Scot Jamie Baker, whose ranking of No.207 is one off his career high.
Baker's joy was tempered by his 2-6, 7-6, 6-1 defeat by fellow Briton James Ward in the first round of the Aegon Trophy in Nottingham yesterday.
British No.2 Ward had already been given a wild card for Queen's. Oli Golding and Liam Broady were the other two to pick up wild cards yesterday.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article